Forum - View topicINTEREST: 12 Kyoto News Agencies Request Police to Reveal Names of Remaining 25 KyoAni Fire Victims
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10420 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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I think it's also worth noting that not releasing names also contributes to misinformation. People, especially within the industry, but also within fandom, are speculating about who survived and who didn't.
She's simply wrong on numerous levels. Most importantly, the names circulating within industry are rumours. I know for a fact that some of the names circulating are wrong, and others, I can only speculate on. Some people within the industry are accepting those rumours at face value, and other people are more reasonably accepting that they are rumours. These people who do have a reason to want to know simply don't know. As I stated above, I learned of the death of one of my friends from the news. Up until that point, everything I heard from within the industry was merely rumour, some of it true, some it false, and some of it not yet answered. Secondly, as has been pointed out by others in this thread, journalists working for reputable publications in Japan do, with some exceptions, have bylines with their names on them. Most countries (including the USA and Canada) have laws, for good reason, that the names of deceased people must be published by the coroners office or the police. I assume Japan has those laws too.
Yes, of course they do! But this is already done. It's normal to publish the names of the deceased. Either the current practice works, or the problem needs to be addressed on a much larger scale. We accept that the "secondary damage" from reporting the name of a deceased person, whether famous or not, is either non-existent or acceptable. His question can be applied to every single murder and accident victim. The media have responsibilities to make sure that their coverage is responsible and current standard protocols for reporting the names of deceased take that into account. I should also make it clear that I do not support the media request. I don't think the media should be demanding that the police release the names just yet. I do however think the Kyoto police should specify what the policy they have come up with for the release of further names. As it is, I don't think they've explained their policy, which makes it look like it is arbitrary, and that is unacceptable. As the article said, delaying the release of names of the deceased is not unprecedented, and (IMHO), it is perfectly acceptable. The police just have to explain the policy (not the reasons for the policy, which are obvious and have been explained, but what is the policy itself). -t |
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Sobe
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There are three registered sex offenders within 5 miles of my residence. I'm sure each one would love to have a few names to steal and use. A name isn't just a name and life is not that simple. I would think anyone who is culturally aware understands the fact that when it comes to naming children, Japanese given names (written in kanji, hiragana, or katakana) have a very unique format given the fact that the characters for the given name itself have meaning no matter how plain or complex the name is. Tombstones and graves are not just for the dead but for the living as well. Those weather just fine compared to human memories of the fallen. Seeing as how after a few years, news agencies find other hot topics to increase site view counts, a news article or two "memorializing" the rest of the deceased is not going to stand at the site of the incident. A wall or memorial will though and, last time I checked, the news agencies wanting the names to be released aren't offering to help pay for such a memorial. Tarnishing someone's memory of the deceased can stem from the fact that a "news agency" (if we can even call them that at this point in time) wants to write a story to memorialize the incident. Constantly reminding someone that person is dead can be just the same. Simply forgetting or wanting to forget is how some people grieve, process it, or move on from grieving. And as someone who understands, I wouldn't want my family to grieve forever or prolong their grieving. I'd want them to move on even if that means they need to forget me. Sometimes that's how much people love another because memories aren't everything all the time. An article to inform the public x amount of people are dead and providing the names isn't simply just an article. What is it they say about "good intentions"? Oh, right. Glorifying, trying to make it sound peaceful, whatever well-intentioned piece of writing someone tries to create will be exactly the kind of insensitive thing to do that plenty of Westerners already do when making others relive memories of the deceased. There will be people who absolutely despise it when others trying to make light of a death by beautifying the death or saying idiotic (to them) things like "they're in a better place now". If someone is grieving and all anyone says to them is "I'm sorry for your loss" over and over, that's going to get old very quickly. It's a touchy subject to begin with for a reason. Those articles serve more than just the purpose of informing. They're also just another reminder among plenty of other reminders that person or those people are gone. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 2945 Location: Email for assistance only |
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I'm sorry, but there are so many false equivalencies in this post. We're discussing the deceased here.
1. The media has special ethical rules when it comes to minors. Their names are not typically published in full except in the event of a death. This even includes if they commit a crime. Pedophiles stealing or tracking down kids in a newspaper doesn't have anything to do with situation. 2. Members of the media are actually discouraged from participating in political or fundraising efforts due to conflict of interest. Last edited by ANN_Lynzee on Thu Aug 22, 2019 8:20 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Top Gun
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None of what you wrote has anything whatsoever to do with the concept of deceased individuals' names being released as a matter of course. As Tempest noted, in many (most?) countries, it's a legal obligation. The fact that people in the same industry, people who may have worked with the deceased in the past, don't even know who survived and who didn't a solid month after the incident is the height of absurdity. Like Tempest said, what if this was a car accident in which two people died? You wouldn't expect the victims' names to be withheld for over a month, would you? So what makes this case different, other than the scale? (Also, the thought that you'd want your loved ones to actively forget you if you suffered an untimely death seems like a sickening prospect, not to mention an impossible request. That's not remotely how grief works.) |
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meiam
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Nothing absurd about that, whether that person is alive or dead will not affect your life in any way for the next few months (since there's always a delay between production and release) and that's the only contact you have with this person. Your grief can wait. If you had other contact, you'd naturally have found out they were dead trough those. And you know who care? The family of the deceased. |
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AkumaChef
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If I understand correctly, the implication was that a pedophile (or other sort of criminal), might assume a deceased person's identity.
I'm not sure what this was directed at directed at, but if it was directed at my comments about the political slant of the media, let me clarify. 1) I wasn't claiming that all news sources engage in this behavior, but many big-name media companies have an obvious political bias. This exists on both sides of the political fence. There are, of course, many exceptions. 2) I didn't mean to imply anything about inappropriate financial activity or overt endorsement of a political candidate. My complaints with the major news sources regarding politics are things like: -choosing to publish articles which advocate a particular position while not publishing ones which would support the opposing viewpoint. -use of misleading statistics -editing of speeches or debates in order to promote one candidate over another ...and so on. For example, a hypothetical news agency which wanted to push an anti-immigrant agenda might do so because of the beliefs of its owners, or perhaps because it's targeting that particular group of viewers/readers. It might choose to publish lots of statistics about, say, immigrants and crime, while never publishing the full set of statistics allowing the reader to put that into context. A hypothetical agency which wanted to push an racial agenda might write something like "....the suspect, John Doe, a Purple male, age 34..." while a more neutral source would simply name the suspect without mentioning their race. The former agency might seek out stories involving crimes committed by a particular race while simultaneously promoting positive stories of another. A hypothetical agency which wanted to push gun control might selectively publish articles about firearms used in crime, but may not publish articles when they were used for legitmiate self-defense or nonviolent purposes. A hypothetical agency which wanted to push an anti-LGBTQ agenda might publish articles which serve to embarrass or belittle members of the LGBT community; one with the opposite agenda might focus on anti-LGBT hate crimes, implying they are more widespread than they actually are. A hypothetical agency which wanted to promote a given political candidate might exclude one or more of his/her opponents from a debate, or might edit the debate footage to show their candidate in his best light while focusing on the gaffes of his opponent. A media agency doesn't have to donate money or endorse a candiate in order to further an agenda. They can do so by choosing what information to put in front of their viewers. Not all media organizations do this, but many do, and you will find examples on all sides of the political landscape. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
Posts: 2945 Location: Email for assistance only |
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All of my comments were directed at the post directly above mine. There was some mention of journalists not paying for the memorial, that's what my second point was about.
Identity-stealing pedophiles getting ideas from obituaries has literally nothing to do with this, it's an imaginary conjecture. |
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Top Gun
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Look, I don't have any personal dog in this fight. I was never a particular fan of KyoAni in general or most of their shows in particular, although I certainly admired both their prodigious talent and business practices. But I think about the untimely deaths of creative individuals that hit me hard personally, people like Satoshi Kon or Robin Williams. And when I consider a scenario where their deaths were the result of some incident that left their status completely unresolved for months, I can't imagine how hard that would have hit. And that would be true a hundred times over for their colleagues in the same industry. Do you really think it's okay that, like Tempest said, even fellow anime creators still find themselves having to play a guessing game as to who actually died? That there may be friends of the deceased who will only find out in a news article who knows how long from now? Like, whether you think the decision is justified or not, there is no debating the fact that the way this situation has been handled is nothing short of profoundly weird. And at least for my money, it's cast a further pall over everything that simply doesn't need to be there. |
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DQBunny
 Posts: 63 Location: Mechanicsburg, PA |
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Ho boy, this is a lot to unpack. But, thank you, Tempest and octopodpie, because you two nailed it.
For AkumaChef: the basic structure of a newspaper is usually: news, sports, entertainment/features, opinion, classifieds/ads. Sub-features comics and scores are lumped into their respective sections. Any good, reputable news site has a mix of all of this. For example, a snapshot of my newspaper's website at this moment includes: - Plans announced for a new Harrisburg office building to house 900 state government employees (news) - Camp Hill district maps out route around proposed Chick-fil-A demolition site for students walking to school (news) - Baltimore Ravens’ Trace McSorley scorches Philadelphia Eagles in first half: Highlights (sports) - King of Prussia Mall: Here are the new stores coming this fall (entertainment/features) We are not just here for entertainment purposes. Do we post items about entertainment? We do. But my paper also helped put a child predator behind bars and won a Pulitzer in the process. The media overall does really important work. As pointed out: "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Another really good example is this recent Pearls Before Swine cartoon that breaks down how good investigative reporting works. This now hangs on my desk at work. I work for a big company, the no. 5 newspaper company in the US when it comes to total circulation. Ergo, to comment on some of the assumptions below ...
That very rarely happens. And if it does, it's not from someone who recently died but rather someone who has been deceased for awhile. If anything, a well-known name of someone who died in a mass murder like the Kyoto Animation fire wouldn't be used because everyone would know that person was dead.
A lot of people tend to get a newspaper's editorial board confused with the newspaper's coverage in general. Yes, there are media outlets with very obvious political slants in their normal news coverage, but I estimate a good 80-90% of print and TV media out there are well-balanced. It is a media outlet's job to cover both sides fairly. As for the reporters themselves, we are at risk of being fired if we do something like donate to a political candidate. Pretty much all companies who own media have policies regarding social media and ethics. Mine certainly does. As you can see from my Twitter, we still have a lot of leeway regarding what we can post about, but I have had to remove some tweets because it accidentally skirted over the partisanship line. I don't tend to post about politics unless I'm the one actually covering the event and am promoting our coverage of said event.
Again, with the exception of a few well-known outlets, most papers will post both sides. There, again, is the confusion about news section vs. opinion section. The job of a good opinion editor is to make sure both sides are balanced, even if the editorial board does swing one way. You can scan through ours to see that there are items on both sides. Likewise, the national news page, which also represents both sides.
Many media sites use the Associated Press stylebook, which is a living document on how these things are handled. The guidelines for race are as follows: race: Consider carefully when deciding whether to identify people by race. Often, it is an irrelevant factor and drawing unnecessary attention to someone’s race or ethnicity can be interpreted as bigotry. There are, however, occasions when race is pertinent: — In stories that involve significant, groundbreaking or historic events, such as being elected U.S. president, being named to the U.S. Supreme Court or other notable occurrences. — In cases where suspects or missing persons are being sought, and the descriptions provided are detailed and not solely racial. Such descriptions apply for all races. The racial reference should be removed when the individual is apprehended or found. — When reporting a demonstration, disturbance or other conflict involving race (including verbal conflicts), or issues like civil rights. In other situations when race is an issue, use news judgment. Include racial or ethnic details only when they are clearly relevant and that relevance is explicit in the story. Do not use a derogatory term except in rare circumstances — when it is crucial to the story or the understanding of a news event. Flag the contents in an editor’s note. NOTE: I did remove the examples provided because otherwise this would be a million miles long.
The opposite is true. Many do NOT do this. Believe me, we don't go to work going, "gee, how are we going to push our agenda today?" We're dealing with staffing issues, how to make sure stuff gets covered fairly, how our readers are getting the information they need. We're talking to our readers every day. We make mistakes and we correct them. Go to your hometown's newspaper, sit down and actually catalogue what's on there. If your hometown paper doesn't have nation/world news in it, it's not that they're willfully abandoning it. They can't afford the expensive wire service to pull in copy or have the staff available to aggregate it. I love and believe strongly in my career and in my colleagues. I bristle all the time at those outlets which are obviously slanted. Trust me, they do not represent the vast majority of us. |
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AkumaChef
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I can certainly empathize with the emphasis I added above, and I can see why someone might really want to know what's going on, and is frustrated with being in the dark. But, I also realize that knowing that information is a want and not a need. Whether or when I learn about a respected artist's death has no real impact on my life: it doesn't affect my health. It doesn't affect my ability to to work, or my ability to be there for my friends and family. It doesn't feed me or put a roof over my head. To claim that it is important enough to bother the bereaved to simply satisfy my curiosity is absurd. I get it, I would really want to know too. But surely we are capable of enough self-reflection to recognize that want is a bit irrational. |
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AkumaChef
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Right, I get that. My point is that to most people, fundamentally, nearly all of that ends up being nothing more than entertainment in the end. Most "news" isn't actually important to the readership other than satisfying their curiosity, which is really just another way of saying that they are entertained by it.
I'm aware that it's not entirely entertainment, I just think that most of it is, at least to most people. Examples of things like catching child predators, exposing corruption, helping to solve major crimes, etc, are absolutely cases of the media going well beyond just "entertainment", and it's certainly praiseworthy. But that seems to be the exception rather than the norm. I can go to CNN or FOX right now and I'll probably see a couple dozen articles about celebs, Trump's tweets, or sex but I doubt I'll see a single one in which the agency helped put a criminal behind bars.
That's a brilliant one. I really like this one, SMBC on Science-based reporting: [url=https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623[/url]
I think I misspoke a bit earlier. I'm not accusing all media, or even the majority of media, of being biased. I've lived in a lot of small towns and I've always found the local papers to be relatively free of bias. Rather, it's a lot of the major outlets which engage in this behavior. As I mentioned above, Washington Post's motto of "Democracy dies in darkness" is absolutely true, but I cringe every time I hear it because, in my opinion, WP is one of the worst offenders when it comes to bias so it strikes me as extremely hypocritical for WP to use it.
The trouble here is that the "few well-known outlets" are very big and have very diverse readership, and thus it is easy for them, the loud minority, to speak for the (relatively) silent majority. It doesn't matter much if a hundred local papers are bias-free when the handful of big names at the top are not. Regarding OP-ED pieces, I do agree that most papers go a good job of showing both sides there. Notice that my list of complaints didn't mention OP-ED at all.
I hope I didn't come across as being critical of all media agencies; if I did then I owe you (and others above!) an apology. My points were really twofold: a) Many of the big-name agencies with an obvious slant offend me, the reader, just as much as they must offend you, a journalist who actually has integrity and cares about both sides of the issue. and b) Fundamentally, whether we want to admit it or not, the majority of people derive little more than entertainment from the news, even if the pieces they are reading might be called something else in the trade. To the average reader, the article about potholes being repaired on main street, a foreign politician's twitter gaffe, or about the bus bombing on the other side of the planet are just as much "entertainment" as the comic strips are. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
Posts: 2945 Location: Email for assistance only |
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Listen, this point that you're making is essentially an attempt to write the hard work of journalists off as tabloid fodder and it isn't based on anything except your own conjecture. News, even when it doesn't lead to actionable consequences literally shapes the opinions of billions of people. Every time a person reads something and forms an opinion based on that information it is but a single piece of their summation as a person. What a person thinks about current events, whether directly relevant to themselves or not, makes up who they are. Are they an empathetic person? Have they learned something that will inform their opinion on issues and in turn help them choose who to vote for in an upcoming election? Following news on local education initiatives might lead to better informed PTA at your kids' elementary school. There's a reason journalism is called The Fourth Estate and it's not because it's all just meaningless "entertainment". I don't expect all our readers to understand the impetus of my career choice, but I say this with as much respect as I can muster, if you don't know what your'e talking about, saying nothing is always an option. |
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AkumaChef
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Not quite. I'm being critical of those news organizations which exhibit bias, but I have nothing against those which do not. My comments about "entertainment" are directed more at the readers and viewers than at the journalist. I apologize if I gave the incorrect impression. I actually feel that it's rather ironic that journalists work hard to research and write an article, expend a lot of effort to check their facts, only for the average reader to skip it entirely because they'd rather about who sexted who, or to have forgotten what the article actually said when it comes election time.
That's absolutely true. But that doesn't mean that what we're talking about isn't fundamentally entertainment at its core. Fiction books, movies, music, (and anime too) also shape the opinions of people and contribute to their life experiences. Calling something entertainment does not mean it is without impact, rather it's a description of the audience's motivation for consuming it.
answer me these questions, honestly please: Do you think the average news reader or viewer consumes that content because they are trying to better themselves, the same way that a student might memorize vocab words or an athlete might run a certain number of laps or might do a weightlifting set? Or do you think they consume the content because they find it interesting and it sates their curiosity about the world around them? In my experience it's the latter. What should we call that if not "entertainment"? Keep in mind that I don't intend the term "entertainment" to be taken as a pejorative, it simply is what it is. It's not a bad thing. Look at ANN for example. I hold ANN's journalism in high regard, yet I think it's very hard to say that it's anything but entertainment. We're all here because we love anime and manga and we want to learn about our favorite people in the industry, our favorite titles, we want to chat with other fans, hear about new releases, etc. What do we call that, if not entertainment? There's probably a few people who work in the industry and get important information relevant to their livelihood from here but you and I both know that most of the readership here is here for fun. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
Posts: 2945 Location: Email for assistance only |
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I get the impression that you haven't been paying attention to most of my efforts for these last nine months then man, and whether you mean it or not, I consider that disrespectful on the highest level. Peace. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I suspect that we are talking past each other at this point, and the root cause is my being pedantic with the definition of the word "entertainment". I mean no disrespect whatsoever. I apologize, and I'll drop it. |
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